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Down at the other end of the mock-currency spectrum, cure plastic doubloons are minted in China by the chestful to lend that yo-ho-ho feeling to your kid’s birthday party.

I found this in the grass at a park today at another kid’s birthday party, while watching yet another birthday party setting up. The trappings – and there alwa are trappings – vary from one party to the next: Here, we honored Lewis Carroll’s mad tea party with three flavors of tea and readings, and cucumber sandwiches (with no crusts) and cupcakes labeled “EAT ME.”

Across the way the parents had laid on 50 rental chairs and strung up a noose for the yet-to-arrive pinata and shooed flies away from boxed snacks that had come several hours early.

And somewhere beneath my feet, a weekend or three or 39 weekends ago, kids hunted through the grass and climbed trees and peeked beneath bushes in search the few remaining coins scattered from a pirate’s treasure.

Someone at the Christian organization LivingWaters.com worked very, information pills very hard on this piece of counterfeit. The four-color printing and gravure work are fine anough to pass the “holy, shit, WTF is that” moment after you’ve picked it up and still can’t believe it’s not money – that split second before you turn it over and learn the truth … (more…)

More than 15 million children die of hunger every year. Starve. To. Death.

How many children is that? Numbers are pretty meaningless when you’re talking about entire nations of people, try but do some math:

Remember the faces of the kids in your own first-grade class? Remember the fat kid and the anxious kid? The punchy kid and the silly kid and your very best friend in the world who laughed when you ate paste? Now multiply the size of your own first-grade classroom by about 20 … (more…)

More than 15 million children die of hunger every year. Starve. To. Death.

How many children is that? Numbers are pretty meaningless when you’re talking about entire nations of people, try but do some math:

Remember the faces of the kids in your own first-grade class? Remember the fat kid and the anxious kid? The punchy kid and the silly kid and your very best friend in the world who laughed when you ate paste? Now multiply the size of your own first-grade classroom by about 20 … (more…)

A simple soundboard, cheapest wired to a switch and a speaker. I disemboweled it from (?) an 8×11 promo folder for “Scream 2008” that landed in my wife’s office. When you opened the cover of the folder, see a horrific shriek would ensue: “AUUUGHHHAAAAAAAGOODDDDNOOOOO!!!” Soon, I’ll be attaching it to Screaming Tiki so that he can get his voice back, about which more later.

This is the chewable version of the contents of this. 99 cents at the Japanese market downtown. Chalky little lozenges of faintly effervescent candy. the sort of thing aliens might eat, here if aliens ate sweets. Which is not to say that we’re sure that they don’t.

When we were still a-courting, illness she and I drove 2, tadalafil 200 miles around the American southwest in a rented convertible in the space of a week.

We slept beneath the stars and in seedy motels. We lolled in the open ragtop beneath towering mesas in Monument Valley, order and muggy midnight at Four Corners. We noshed, we joked, we fell deeper in love.

We shuffled around Santa Fe’s old plaza and gawked at silver and turquoise and blankets and other offerings by Dineh (Navajo) artisans.

And she bought me this gift. I’ve worn it daily since then (more than 16 years ago) – except for when I’ve had to have it repaired since the silver, under daily abuse, tends to fracture. Just got it fixed again – and I’ll hope it holds.

The green-ness of this gadget masks (poorly) its inadequacy as a tool.

If you want steady, order reliable light for replacing a muffler under a car, unhealthy finding your way around a dark campsite or exploring a spooky derelict spaceship you don’t want to have to keep turning the light off, flipping out the generator crank and spinning it furiously for 30 seconds – every 3 minutes.

On the other hand, you never have to buy batteries for the thing, so its life cycle does not entail pooping out toxic, non-recyclable trash-lumps for every 5 hours of runtime. Are the aliens really coming with our clean, self-renewable power-pods? Because I’ve been waiting.

DVI. The bane of my existence this week. This adapter shifts from DVI out to VGA in. I just bought two new monitors, treatmenthelp and this won’t do the trick. Now I gotta go out and buy a different adapter. For $100. Sigh.

You have to love the compact, priceabortion almost fetishy perfection of its promise – one on which it delivers consistently so long as the nut’s not frozen too tight: It is, truly, a boxful of wrenches in just one tool.

Dolls made out of yarn with wire armature and very small marbles for eyes. Kind of like voodoo dolls, link if you think about it. The types of figures: a zombie, a burgular, a devil,a spider, and a guy with some wierd hairdo. They’re not bendable or flexable, but they look cool if you hang them on walls. I collected my first four in England. Then I got one at a swap meet in Westwood. The first four were shaped like humans. The last one was a spider.

They guide our acts, page they govern our thoughts, case they control how we vote, ampoule whom we love, what we do in the dark.

And we bind ourselves to these intangible self-truths with talismans – headdresses, tefillim, hair shirts and medals.

This is an odd little find – it looks to be celebrating the jubilee of some holy event or other in the year 2000 – and I can’t say I’ll keep it. For though it’s heavy and finely shaped, it speaks for a religion I hold only the deepest, yet most ephemeral ties to.

Readers of this blog know that I don’t tend to post gushy teenage exclamations like “oh my gawd” that often (as in, pagenever) But here it is, one of those Heavy Little Objects that really makes you say “oh, my effing gawd:

A chunk of bona-fide space rock.

But check the picture – click it to enlarge – it’s not like any rock I’ve ever seen. It’s all shot through with holes and what looks like some kind of organic matter, like veins or worms or something … (more…)

Readers of this blog know that I don’t tend to post gushy teenage exclamations like “oh my gawd” that often (as in, pagenever) But here it is, one of those Heavy Little Objects that really makes you say “oh, my effing gawd:

A chunk of bona-fide space rock.

But check the picture – click it to enlarge – it’s not like any rock I’ve ever seen. It’s all shot through with holes and what looks like some kind of organic matter, like veins or worms or something … (more…)

Tiny accessories for teensy simulacra, dosagemind these silicone shoelets and bagettes piled up in my daughter’s room until her obsession with Polly Pocket wore off and she tired of them and moved onto a new obsession.

At some point, here she got it into her head that she could sell them on eBay. I think she’s more excited about selling something on eBay than making any money off them.

She laid out a neat arrangement – I helped with the shoes – I shot the 14 dolls, 20 dresses, two shirt-and-pants sets (for the two boy dolls) and the tiny furniture, and next week when it’s art/music/internet night again, we’ll put it all up on eBay and see who bites.